and then spend most of their time arguing about it?
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Bonobos use a kind of syntax once thought to be unique to humans
11–20 of 141 posts
Re: Bonobos use a kind of syntax once thought to be unique to humans
#12> They recorded over 300 of these observations, including what the caller was doing at the time, what was happening in the environment and the behaviour of the caller and audience after the vocalisation.
> To reveal the meaning of each call, they used a technique from linguistics to create a cloud of utterance types, placing vocalisations that occurred in similar circumstances closer together. “We kind of established this dictionary,” says Berthlet. “We have one vocalisation and one meaning.”
This is lots of manual effort, could the recent advancement in language models help decode animal languages more easily? I guess it will need lots 24/7 capture of physical movement/action and sound data and train a model (that already understands vocal English too) perhaps.
Re: Bonobos use a kind of syntax once thought to be unique to humans
#13It is funny how at least the press written about this sort of research seems to imply only humans have language and some new evidence might challenge that notion.
Really if you ever own a pet, probably any pet I bet, you find that communication in a way that is arguably a language is pretty low level stuff in the animal kingdom. And it makes sense as it is quite useful for a species to communicate things about the world. You turn your community into a meta organism: rather than continuous appendages and nerve endings you might have a meerkat a couple hundred yards observing for predators for you sharing their own senses on their own body with you through their long distance communication abilities in the form of their vocalizations or body language. Now you can solely be a meerkat and get all this information about the area without having to evolve into some lovecraftian horror with a set of eyes and ears every 100 yards.
Re: Bonobos use a kind of syntax once thought to be unique to humans
#14they're called Large Language Monkeys
Re: Bonobos use a kind of syntax once thought to be unique to humans
#15> They recorded over 300 of these observations, including what the caller was doing at the time, what was happening in the environment and the behaviour of the caller and audience after the vocalisation. > To reveal the meaning of each call, they used a technique from linguistics to create a cloud of utterance types, placing vocalisations that occurred in similar circumstances closer together. “We kind of established…
I definitely think you’re touching on some exciting possibilities, but adding a language model at this early stage would endanger the goal of this particular research: proving that the compositionality exists in the first place. If there was a foundational language model we’re involved, it might be reading patterns into the calls regardless of whether they’re really there — that is what it’s designed to do, after all!
Re:”lots of work”, I think you’re misunderstanding the quotes a bit. They applied PCA to categorical data to generate semantic positions for each call type—or, in other words, ran a prewritten mathy algo on a big csv. Collecting the CSV data in the first place certainly sounds extremely hard, but that’s more of a practical issue than a scientific one! Bonobos aren’t known for living in easy-to-reach places ;)
Re: Bonobos use a kind of syntax once thought to be unique to humans
#16It is funny how at least the press written about this sort of research seems to imply only humans have language and some new evidence might challenge that notion. Really if you ever own a pet, probably any pet I bet, you find that communication in a way that is arguably a language is pretty low level stuff in the animal kingdom. And it makes sense as it is quite useful for a species to communicate things about the wo…
Language is not just "communication" and not every communication is language. Bees and ants communicate information chemically, but they're not using a structured language. Dogs may growl to intimidate or yelp if they get hurt, and that surely communicates information, but whether they are using a structured language is a matter of research.
Re: Bonobos use a kind of syntax once thought to be unique to humans
#17It is funny how at least the press written about this sort of research seems to imply only humans have language and some new evidence might challenge that notion. Really if you ever own a pet, probably any pet I bet, you find that communication in a way that is arguably a language is pretty low level stuff in the animal kingdom. And it makes sense as it is quite useful for a species to communicate things about the wo…
I don't think anyone denies that communication is not unique to humans. It is clearly not. But what is (apparently - as far as we know) unique to humans is language, meaning the capacity to combine concepts in an infinitely recursive manner to represent an infinity of concepts and ideas. On top of that, we also posses the ability to communicate (verbally, through sign, or more recently through writing) those combined concepts in such a way that other humans can then recreate that concept in their own mind.
There's evidence that language first evolved as a capacity for processing the outside world internally - your inner voice, if you will. The ability to synthesize any idea about things you can and can not see or even ever experience. The speaking and communicative part of it may have actually arisen secondarily, as evidenced by the fact that "language" does not have to be spoken - it can be expressed in many different mediums.
Communication and language are not one in the same. Language is a means of communication, but it also so much more than that.
I found the book Why Only Us by Chomsky and Berwick to a be a great introduction to the topic.
Re: Bonobos use a kind of syntax once thought to be unique to humans
#18It is funny how at least the press written about this sort of research seems to imply only humans have language and some new evidence might challenge that notion. Really if you ever own a pet, probably any pet I bet, you find that communication in a way that is arguably a language is pretty low level stuff in the animal kingdom. And it makes sense as it is quite useful for a species to communicate things about the wo…
This is a lively debate in linguistics, so while it’s not objectively true (i.e. it depends on how you want to use the word), it’s much more justified than you’re implying here. As others have said, it’s about distinguishing the kind of communication humans do from simple animal communication — a common hook for this topic is the fun fact that “chimpanzees can learn sign language, but they’ve never asked a question”. It’s somewhat analogous to how animal communication can be seen as categorically distinct from simple signaling done by flowers, scent markers, etc.
I’m in a bit of a rush but suffice to say that Chomsky is probably the best champion of the “language is compositional” view, or as he puts it, “language is the generation of an infinite range of meaningful outputs from a finite range of inputs”. There’s dozens of great, layperson-friendly talks of his on this topic on YouTube, for anyone who’s curious!
Re: Bonobos use a kind of syntax once thought to be unique to humans
#19they're called Large Language Monkeys
Cute.
Re: Bonobos use a kind of syntax once thought to be unique to humans
#20Reinforcing my strongly held belief that what fundamentally sets humans apart isn't spoken language, or tools, or any of that, but rather the fact we write down what we know, then make those writings available to future generations to build on. We're a species distinguished from all others by our information-archival and -dissemination practices. We're an archivist species, a librarian species. Homo archivum. In my opinion.